Tessa Storey. Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. XVI, 296 S. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84433-8.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Cohen (Department of Humanities York University)
Published on H-Italy (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Gregory Hanlon
Mercenary Sex in Rome
a series of small topical discussions, generally thoughtful
though sometimes not wholly convincing. These are then
arranged more and less snugly into thematic chapters.
Overarching the whole and addressed primarily at the
book’s beginning and end is the question about whether
the Counter-Reformation could transform public morality, represented by prostitution, that eye-catching wen
on the face of the pope’s capital. In the scholarship that
Storey reviews, Europe’s several religious reformations
appear to have varied greatly in their effects for women;
in some places prostitutes and their trade suffered sharp
rebuke. Yet assessments of Catholic renewal see “missionary” campaigns to remedy the ordinary laity’s conduct taking hold only slowly. Storey therefore argues effectively that even on the papal doorstep, in the years
from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century,
prostitution showed more continuity than discernible
change.
In the past two decades, women’s history and “history from below” have revised the study of prostitution.
Superceding a predominantly top-down history of institutional repression and moralized marginalization, scholarship now sees much more clearly the women themselves as workers, as members of families and communities, and as social and, occasionally, cultural actors. Prostitution thus moves from being a slightly sordid academic
sidebar to claim its place in an integrated economic, social, and cultural history. This shift of optic derives
largely from reframed questions, but also exploits new
sorts of documentation. For early modern Europe, Italian
cities, with their rich judicial archives, provide particularly gratifying sites for developing these new perspectives on the sex trades and their workers. In this vein,
Tessa Storey’s book offers an extended, lively picture
of Rome’s infamous “carnal commerce” from the point
of view not only of government and religious authorities, but also of the women and their customers. While
the monograph builds on mostly smaller studies touching Roman prostitution by other international scholars,
it incorporates wide-ranging research in additional primary sources and seeks to assess the place of this city’s
sex trade in the broader range of early modern European
practices.
The study speaks to this Counter-Reformation thesis from diverse and sometimes oblique angles. The first
chapter reviews early modern Italian (literally) pornographic texts. Reading these often illustrated, moralized
entertainments as descriptive of and addressed to prostitutes as well as to their customers, Storey identifies cultural tropes, such as the manager mother and the absent
To situate her ample archival investigation, Storey father, which she later links to behavior reported in Rohas read widely about European prostitution with an ad- man judicial narratives. Her focus then narrows to the
mixture of social and cultural theory. The monograph city of Rome. Following a sketch of “The Social and Culadopts a patchwork mode of organization that clumps tural Context,” two chapters take up government regulagroups of primary and related secondary materials into tion of prostitutes and its enforcement. “Debating Pros1
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titution” shows the risks of letting princely decrees–for
example, banishing sex workers–stand alone as evidence
of past reality. Instead, a re-reading of manuscript avvisi
(newsletters) alongside a pair of open “letters” on local affairs lets Storey reconstruct for the decades between 1565
and 1595 an intermittent contest that pitted the popes,
especially the most ascetic reformers, against more pragmatically minded city fathers, identified here with the
Popolo Romano. With institutionalized policy on Roman
prostitution still incompletely deciphered by historians,
the scope and impact of this controversy remain elusive.
Nonetheless, Storey’s elaboration usefully nuances any
simple tale of Catholic transformation. Next, “Policing
Prostitution” describes the thuggish police and, drawing
on their arrest records, the erratic regimes of harassment
the women faced. In these chapters, as elsewhere, some
archival evidence is reported quantitatively. The author
is careful not to claim too much for such figures, but overall we need to know more about the numbers’ generation
in order to weigh their meaning; a “sample” with unspecified boundaries tells little.
wealth. It is to note nevertheless that this compass
largely excludes the celebrated “honest courtesans” who
flourished under the Renaissance papacy. Here, based in
local regulations, the term has quite another meaning–
ordinary prostitutes operating publicly, as distinct from
part-time or more discreet sex workers officially deemed
“illicit.” Labelling and category difficulties of this sort
have long plagued scholars, and remain a problem here.
The book sketches working distinctions between prostitutes of high, middling, and low status based on access
to economic and social capital. But it does not deploy the
categories systematically, so that it is often hard to gauge
the scope of general claims.
While the book reads engagingly, weakness in the
fine structure of its crafting subverts its full success. Its
varied sources require dexterity with paleography, alertness to literary forms and legal procedures, and sensitivity to early modern linguistic practices. For those interested in the details, let me use one type of document familiar to me–trial records (processi) from the governor’s
court–and one instance of their use, to represent sometimes problematic strategies of selection and of reading
that recur elsewhere in this study. Among the many trial
records for the period where prostitutes figure prominently, the book chooses just seven and those for unclear reasons. One trial is thus mostly about Orvieto,
not Rome. As for interpretation, trials must be read not
in bits and pieces as straightforward snapshots of experience, but as multilayered documents having their own
textual trajectories. Using them, as the book does, mostly
in small segments often obscures crucial contextual framing.
At the core of the book are five colorful chapters that
depict the commerce of prostitution as experienced by
the traders and their customers. Harvesting the fruits
of Rome’s judicial records, these chapters portray strikingly the complicated, but still real economic and social
agency exercised by many of these women. Among studies of Roman prostitution, Storey’s inquiry attends distinctively to the “business” end and to the women not
only as sellers of their commodified “bodies,” but also
as consumers and brokers of material culture. It is especially in these settings that the author locates her vision of the prostitutes’ identities of autonomy. A selection of lively, sometimes chronologically scattered examples also highlights the social relations of prostitutes with
their families and their clients. These episodes speak to
the question of the women’s segregation from or integration with respectable society, a subject broached as a
spatial matter in chapter 3. Among other themes, Storey
emphasizes friendship as a Renaissance social mode; she
sees its ideals constructing the relations between prostitutes and their amici fermi (regular clients), as well as
framing a masculinity-enhancing practice where several
men shared a single courtesan. Discounting a bias toward agonism in judicial records, the author recognizes
that conflicts and rivalries occurred, but generally plays
down their role in shaping the distinctly personal relationships characteristic of Rome’s sex trade.
Take, for example, the argument for potentially
strong affective ties between prostitutes and clients. One
of two cases Storey discusses on this point features Delia
Romana, a prostitute patronized by a police captain on
trial for murder and other abuses of his power (pp. 225226). To explain why she sought news when she heard
of the captain’s arrest, Delia testified, as translated, “it
was my right to know how Captain Valerio was, because
I loved him (lo amavo) and was fond of him (gli volevo
bene).” It is an exceptionally forthright emotional pronouncement, as Storey says, but its meaning is not selfevident. How do we know, in context, what these two
similar but distinct expressions convey? This vocabulary of “love,” particularly challenging for modern translators, was not clear to the magistrates either. Prodded to
explain herself, the prostitute then said, as translated, “I
The study deserves praise for undertaking to exam- loved him because we had known one another as lovers
ine prostitutes and courtesans of varying prestige and (concubinatione) and had spent time together.” Storey’s
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version of this statement raises other problems. In fact,
Delia’s word in the manuscript is conversatione, not concubinatione, and suggests something more neutral, like
“because I had socialized with him.” A sexual link is possible in this phrasing but, for this witness, not yet explicit. That comes next, when the official asks what sort
of “conversation” and how long. In an emotion-laden response that Storey does not report, Delia gets teary, as
the trial transcript notes, and then, hesitatingly, admits
to knowing the captain since last Carnival, when he had
sex with her and claimed her virginity. The book’s interpretation overlooks this discursive sequence of the trial.
It also fails to contextualize Delia’s unusual declarations
more broadly in her youth, age fifteen, and her special
vulnerability to a powerful man who had taken her virginity. With this additional information, might we understand Delia’s proclamation of “love” for her client differently? Storey, instead, leaves this girl’s two sentences
to stand, almost alone, as representing prostitutes’ potential sentiments and turns to discuss clients’ feelings.
All in all, this book offers a feast of interesting material. Its general contentions about prostitutes as persistent and active players in the daily life of CounterReformation Rome ring true. In the middle range of argument and in detail, however, the delivery is uneven.
Deeper analytical consistency and a fuller sense of the
many contexts into which the discussion ventures would
strengthen an ambitious project.
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Citation: Elizabeth Cohen. Review of Storey, Tessa, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. H-Italy, H-Net
Reviews. May, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24563
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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